by Frank Conroy
There is a culling board athwart the center of the boat. The most dangerous part of the operation is leaning over the side and manhandling the dredge, now full, weighing close to a hundred pounds, up onto the culling board to spill out crabs, seaweed, eel grass, gunk, and, one hopes, scallops. It is at the precise moment of pulling up the dredge that you can slip and fall overboard. With the boots, heavy clothing, and slickers, drowning is a certainty without quick help from one’s partner.
The scallops are picked out of the mess on the culling board, the year-old ones (you can tell by the rings) thrown back into the water along with the slightly slimy vegetation. Then the dredges are thrown over and another run commences.
I gave it up one foggy day when I was out alone. I was getting scallops, but at one point I almost lost my balance. I was simply not strong enough to pull up the dredges smoothly, and I had a sudden flash of my vulnerability. I decided then and there to give up scalloping, and in fact never attempted it again. (Phil was also ready to throw in the towel.) Instead I used the boat to go fishing when the weather was warm and the sun shone.
During the summer I worked at night, playing jazz, or now and then doing magazine pieces in the daytime. I found myself spending more and more time fishing, not for money, but because I liked it.
Island wisdom had it that Polpis Harbor held so few fish that working it would be a waste of time. I was absurdly pleased with myself to prove otherwise. I fished with a surf rod, standing on the culling board, and I discovered that Polaroid sunglasses allowed me to see into the water to a depth of four or five feet. Weeks of moving from spot to spot, throwing anchor and casting the shiny drail, allowed me over time to discover that striped bass, and the occasional bluefish, entered and exited the harbor along specific channels, and that even at the southern end they moved along certain pathways. I could see them—dark, fast-moving shadows streaking along over the sandy bottom—and I learned how to cast in front of them. The excitement attendant to a strike, the sudden pull, the fish often leaping up into the air, never failed to thrill me, no matter how many fish I caught.
The sought-after fish is the striped bass—mild, sweet, and easy to cook. Bluefish, much more common in Nantucket waters, are oily, with a strong fishy flavor, and make a fine pâté (an island specialty). They can be broiled, soaked in gin, and touched with a lit match to lift out some of the oil, as the late Robert Benchley used to do it, to good effect.
There is a curious fact associated with bluefish. Wauwinet, Quaise, Shawkemo, Polpis, Quidnet, Madaket, Coatue, etc., are all Anglicized Indian names. Indians were the first people on the island, as far back as circa 300 A.D., the carbon date for some deer bone tools dug out of the earth.
Stone arrowheads and blades can be found all over the island by the trained eye. (The Unitarian minister has more than once plucked up an arrowhead from my driveway, despite my having searched carefully and finding nothing. He has a wonderful collection.) The Indians died out, and when the last one expired, the bluefish disappeared. The oral history connects the two events. For seventy-five years not a single bluefish was caught. These days it is not uncommon to see small boats come in with big catches, the fish having returned even if the Indians did not.
A small cycle occurred in Polpis Harbor, where twenty-five years ago there were so many blue shell crabs scuttling around that I could pole net twenty or thirty in an hour. They disappeared for quite some time, but show signs of coming back.
I remember one morning in the early seventies when I was anchored in a particularly good position on the south side of Second Point, where the channel the fish used was narrow and well defined. My reel was snarled and I sat down and fixed it. When I looked up I saw two friends, who’d heard that I was catching fish, in a rowboat fishing on the other side of the point. We waved to each other and I thought of telling them to come over, but some atavistic fisher/ hunter reflex kept me silent. It was (at that time) my harbor, after all. So Alan and Twig had to sit in their boat, catching nothing, and watch me pull in three nice-sized bass in perhaps twenty casts. Later, I told them during a beery dart game about the channels, but they never came back. It was a long haul from town, in any case.
I really didn’t have enough money to maintain Que Blahmo properly, but I was determined to keep it. Mooring was a problem, since I did not have a mushroom (as they called it). I tied cement blocks (no good) and finally a heavy iron engine stand, which seemed to work. In the morning I could look out my window while eating breakfast and see the heavy, green, funky boat bobbing in the water.
Eventually there was a gale, from the south, and the boat pulled the engine stand out of the mud and dragged it up harbor, where Que Blahmo finally sank, fifty-horse Evinrude and all. Here one moment, totally gone the next.
I should have gotten the message and washed my hands of the whole business, but I didn’t. With the kind of stubbornness that can affect you when you’re close to broke, I insisted on keeping up my fishing life-style, not falling back, as it were. I began to haunt the shipyard out in Madaket, finally acting when an inexpensive used boat became available. I got it cheap because it was aluminum, and riveted hulls were definitely out of favor on Nantucket. It was an old black Starcraft from the fifties, with red vinyl seats, a padded dash, and a windshield—so retro I had to have it. No more standing on the culling board, but I already knew where the channels were, so it didn’t matter. I called it Elvis, and it was fast enough so I could take my boys water skiing, which they loved for a couple of years and then mysteriously lost interest. I had gotten a mushroom this time, but stupidly overlooked the proper clasps, knots, and other paraphernalia with which the rope from the boat is attached to the mooring. Simple ignorance. One afternoon, during a hurricane, I stood at the rain-streaked window thinking I should have beached the boat, only to see a granny knot fail and the boat sail away up harbor with the wind.
I ran down to the water, and then along the shore as the boat lurched along in the angry water to come to rest in the shallows of the long spit of land separating the north end of Polpis Harbor from Nantucket Harbor proper. The wind was fearsome—seventy to eighty miles an hour, I would later learn—but as I saw waves breaking over the stern of the boat I jumped into the waist-high water and got behind it, hoping to save the engine. As I struggled (ineffectively) to lift the stern, a sudden gust took the glasses off my head. In a surreal moment I watched them fly up into the air, way up, and disappear over the spit, higher and higher, smaller and smaller, until I couldn’t see them anymore. The boat swamped and the engine was lost. Eventually the wind actually blew the boat over and upside-down, bending the windshield beyond repair. Elvis was trashed out, and, brokenhearted, I would eventually give the hull away.
Boats are more heartbreak and worry than they are a joy. Something always seems to go wrong. An engine briefly catches on fire on the way to Coatue. The battery dies for no apparent reason. The draining hole stopper dries out and springs a leak. I don’t know how many mornings I would come down to the window half expecting the boat to have disappeared, then relieved that it had not, but still nervous enough to worry if the stern might not be riding a bit heavy in the water. I knew I wasn’t the only one to feel anxiety. My good friend David Halberstam had a Boston Whaler for a while, from which we fished out in the ocean, but he finally gave it up. “Marine engines,” he said. “The tolerances are like airplane engines, so they’re expensive, but they keep conking out anyway.” For many years now he has glided through the harbor in his racing scull, keeping fit while enjoying the water.
Gracie and Maggie.
The fact is, once you’ve tooled around in Nantucket waters, once you see the island from that vantage point, you can’t easily give it up entirely. It becomes essential that you have a way to go over to Coatue for private skinny-dipping, or into town via the harbor to see the hundreds of yachts moored there or tied up at the docks. In recent years there seem to be more and more really big yachts, sometimes with helicopters tied down on deck. Fran
k Sinatra sailed in one day, a young woman dressed in white playing a flute in the bow as they docked. The boat was enormous, of course.
And there are more intimate pleasures—bird watching from a kayak small enough to let you navigate up a stream, and then back down to, for instance, Polpis Harbor, where Maggie likes to paddle along with our dog Gracie shadowing her.
THE YEARS PASSED, during which I began teaching at the University of Iowa and M.I.T. My financial situation improved markedly, and I started haunting Madaket Marine again. And so I came by the boat we have today, a seventeen-foot Chincoteegue brought up from the Chesapeake (it’s a duck boat) by a member of the Dupont family who fell too ill to use it. We named it Buzz Cut, and we’re now on the second engine.
During the season a lot of people live on their boats, and the harbor fills up. The launch is in continuous operation taking people to and from the wharf. I should mention the Nantucket Lightship (a floating lighthouse), which was decommissioned years ago, spent time in various mainland harbors, and was finally brought back to Nantucket by someone who bought it on eBay. Fitted out for landlubbers, it can be rented, and lived in, for fourteen thousand dollars a week.
Frank and engine.
Slow Down! You’re Already on Nantucket
PERIODICALLY AN IDEA COMES UP IN ONE town meeting or the other: a scheme to control the number of automobiles coming onto the island. Nothing changes, however. Even limits that seem sensible, say, two or three cars per household, never get implemented. As cars rule America, cars rule Nantucket. The summer traffic in town is so intense it has affected the way the island has grown. More and more facilities, from the supermarket to an ancillary post office, are located in what is now the outskirts of town. Small clusters of retailers, most of them pretty fancy, seem to have sprung up everywhere. Niche restaurants abound, every one with a parking lot. Downyflake Doughnuts, where working people and families can get lunch at reasonable prices, is out of town. (A hallowed institution, by the way, and well worth a visit, even at six-thirty in the morning.)
I am on the island as I write this. I went into town at 11:30 this morning with a few errands to do, using a system that works well enough to allow me to do everything in two and a half hours.
First you must plan. The mail. (And thereby hangs a tale. We’ve had a post office box for thirty-five years, which we are loath to give up because there is a six-year waiting list to get one. We could use a mailbox at the end of our driveway, of course, but we don’t. The post office identifies us as long-term Nantucketers, and I admit we are irrationally proud of that fact.)
A slice of pizza and a Nantucket Nectars lemonade from the Steamship Wharf would be nice. Pick up an orange juice machine at the Marine Home Center (housewares section). Croissants. The New York Times. Two dust masks.
Ordinarily one would do it by the map, going from one place to the next, but there is a better way.
The system involves going into the clotted heart of town to check out the post office first. Today there were no parking places within two blocks so I didn’t stop, but moved slowly through the side streets to come out at the pizza place. There were no spaces there either, but I knew I could park on the road the trucks use to get on the ferry if I left my lights flashing as I dashed across the street. (The pizza was good. The best on the island, in fact. I ate in the car.)
Then back to the post office, and this time a car pulls out of a space just as I arrive, so I park, get the mail (and the New York Times from The Hub), and continue on my way. Halfway out of town I stop at the Nantucket Bakery for croissants. As I continue homeward I stop at the Marine Home Center (parking lot) for the juicer, Island Lumber (parking lot) for the dust masks, and so back home.
Remain flexible, the system says. Never stop unless a car pulls out of a parking place, or you are out of town. Drive around the block. Breathe deeply. Play soothing music on the radio. Smile.
The island is proud that there are no traffic lights anywhere. And this is as irrational as keeping a post office box. There are at least four complicated intersections everyone knows should have traffic lights, both for safety and to speed things up. Everyone also knows it won’t happen in the foreseeable future.
Traffic is a problem in a lot of places, but the combination of Nantucket’s narrow streets and the presence of Hummers, Expeditions, and other oversized vehicles (Veblen!) makes things particularly tough. The bicycle paths, and the introduction of public transport, have helped a bit, but more and more cars seem to come each summer, with no signs of slowing down.
ACK
Not a bumper sticker, but a decal spelling out the
code for Nantucket airport. A favorite of summer
people rather than natives.
ACK NICELY
A gentle warning to the visitors
NATIVE
And proud of it. Although a lot of people
have been forced out, many have stayed,
toughing out the high cost of living.
NATIVE. AN ENDANGERED SPECIES
A Certain Romance
THE NEW YORK TIMES REPORTS ON THE popularity of what it calls “destination weddings,” and Nantucket turns out to be a prime example. The Chamber of Commerce has an information clearing house, listing churches, caterers, photographers, musicians, tent rentals, bartenders, and everything else that might be needed. (A good friend of ours, Mary Keller—she of the chador—plays her harp at such events and earns a significant part of her income thus.) It is not that hard to understand why people might want to be married on Nantucket. A certain romance attends to crossing thirty miles of ocean to arrive at a beautiful, historic, unique, and high-status island. Some marry in churches, others on the beach, or in a garden, or even in the moors. For all of them, one surmises, the event and the memory of the event are framed by the Nantucket atmosphere, which, like sense memories of food or the scent of flowers, is exceedingly difficult to capture in words while remaining quite vivid in memory. In many ways the island is a splendid place to get married. People smile when they see a wedding, as if the celebration is communal, and of course, most essentially, it is.
I’ve described elsewhere how I met my wife on Nantucket more than thirty years ago. She was hitch-hiking because her car had a dead battery, and in accordance with the winter rules, I picked her up. We hit it off immediately and were married in the Episcopal church a year or so later. Maggie’s mother and her large network of Boston pals stayed at the Jared Coffin House and had a good time, watching the Kentucky Derby at the reception, cocktails aloft.
Places can insinuate themselves into your very soul if you have lived and grown there. I cannot separate my love for Maggie from my love for the island, for instance. There are overlaps. (And in a totally different way I love our ten-months-a-year home in Iowa City, where I wrote two books and learned how to teach.)
I WORRY THAT I haven’t done Nantucket justice in these pages. It has a special feeling, a special aspect unlike any other place I’ve been. (An English village in which I lived years ago. Visits to London, Paris, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Budapest, Portugal, Spain, Mexico, and the Caribbean, to name a few. Each had a flavor, of course, but none as powerful to me as the faraway island.)
My second son met his wife on Nantucket. She was an Irish girl who’d come over for a summer job, and she wound up staying. They married on Nantucket and their son, Liam Wainwright Conroy, was born on Nantucket. There is a brick with his name on it on a special wall in the hospital. A wall, as they call it, of Native Born. So my grandson discovered Nantucket even earlier than I did, as I stood on the bow of that ship watching the boys dive for coins so long ago.
Two summers ago Julia, my daughter-in-law, was walking on the ’Sconset beach. The water was calm and she took off her shoes to wade. After a while she felt something on her ankle, reached down and retrieved a one-hundred-dollar bill. She spotted another one close by, drifting like seaweed, and kept searching for a while until it was clear there weren’t any more. Probably someone
had gone swimming with the money in his bathing suit with the pocket unbuttoned.
I was reminded yet again of the boys diving for coins, and of the passage of time. We live and the world changes around us, slowly, to be sure, but every now and then something happens, some unusual occurrence that stands like a signpost, a marker of the relentless passage of time which no one, and no place, can escape.
SOURCES
I’VE USED SEVERAL BOOKS. MOST IMPORTANT was Robert F. Mooney’s excellent source book, Nantucket Only Yesterday, Wesco Publishing, 2000. Also helpful were Nantucket, The Last 100 Years, compiled and edited by John Stanton, published by the Inquirer and Mirror Press, 2001; We Are Nantucket, edited by Brian L.P. Zevnik, Wellington Press, 2002; and Nan tucket in the Nineteenth Century, Clay Lancaster, Dover Publications Inc., 1979. Also, Celestial Messengers, a play by Maggie Conroy. My thanks to the Inquirer and Mirror, the Nantucket Historical Association, and the Nantucket Chamber of Commerce. My debt to all of these good people is large.
ALSO IN THE CROWN JOURNEYS SERIES
Land’s End by Michael Cunningham
After the Dance by Edwidge Danticat
City of the Soul by William Murray
Washington Schlepped Here by Christopher Buckley
Hallowed Ground by James McPherson
Fugitives and Refugees by Chuck Palahniuk
Blues City by Ishmael Reed
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
FRANK CONROY is the longtime director of the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the author of Stop-Time, Midair, Body & Soul, and Dogs Bark, but the Caravan Rolls On.
ALSO BY FRANK CONROY
Stop-Time
Midair
Body & Soul
Dogs Bark, but the Caravan Rolls On
